"I had just exited the terrifying dark corridors of Doom 3 to
find myself, alone, in a dark, silent, rural house with
nothing but the light of my cell phone to pierce the night.
Why was the power out? There were no storms, no lightning, no
wind. It could only be zombies. Surely the yard outside was
crawling with the flesh-eating undead. I knew it was
irrational to seriously think that this was anything other
than a routine power outage. Zombies aren't smart enough to
cut the power. I was terrified. I called my mother. I'm 39.
I'm not kidding."
The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose
our form of government on anyone else.
-- GWB, state of the union 2005
"It's the lowest density of any solid, and it has the highest
thermoinsulation properties. Though it would be very expensive, you
could take a two- or three-bedroom house, insulate it with aerogel,
and y ou could heat the house with a candle. But eventually the house
would become too hot."
-- Aerogel
"If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if
Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill
as many as possible"
-- Harry S. Truman (later the US president who ordered the a-bombs to
be used against Japan), adressing the Senate in 1941
(My reference: Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun, ISBN: 0-684-82414-0,
his reference: "quoted in New York Times, 24.vi.41, p. 7.")
"We're the world's greatest superpower, but we have a Third World
electricity grid"
-- Richardson, governor of New Mexico.
"Aristotelian logic deals with certainties, and in the lack of
certainties throughout most of life, Aristotelian logic subliminally
program us to invent fictitious certainties. That rush for fictitious
certainties explains most ideologies and demned near all the religions
on the planet, I think."
-- Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology
George Bush (Sr.) interviewed by Robert I. Sherman of American Atheist Press
on August 27 1987:
RS: "What will you do to win the votes of Americans who are atheists?"
GB: "I guess I'm pretty weak in the atheist community. Faith in God is
important to me."
RS: "Surely you recognize the equal citizenship and patriotism of
Americans who are atheists?"
GB: "No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens,
nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under
God."
RS: "Do you support as a sound constitutional principle the separation
of state and church?"
GB: "Yes, I support the separation of church and state. I'm just not
very high on atheists."
On October 29, 1988, Mr. Sherman had a confrontation with Ed Murnane,
co-chairman of the Bush-Quayle '88 Illinois campaign. This concerned a
lawsuit Mr. Sherman had filed to stop the Community Consolidated
School District 21 (Chicago, Illinois) from forcing his first-grade
atheist son to pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States as
"one nation under God" (Bush's phrase). The following conversation
took place:
RS: "American Atheists filed the Pledge of Allegiance lawsuit
yesterday. Does the Bush campaign have an official response to
this filing?"
EM: "It's bullshit."
RS: "What is bullshit?"
EM: "Everything that American Atheists does, Rob, is bullshit."
RS: "Thank you for telling me what the official position of the Bush
campaign is on this issue."
EM: "You're welcome."
"Why of course the people don't want war... But after all it is the
leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a
simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a
fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship...
Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of
the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are
being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and
exposing the country to danger."
-- Hermann Goering,
Hitler's designated successor, the second man in the Third Reich
April 18, 1946
Nuremberg Trials.
"I recall to your attention the extraordinary fact with which I
began. To wit, that the human being, like the immortals, naturally
places sexual intercourse far and away above all other joys -- yet he
has left it out of his heaven! The very thought of it excites him;
opportunity sets him wild; in this state he will risk life,
reputation, everything -- even his queer heaven itself -- to make good
that opportunity and ride it to the overwhelming climax. From youth
to middle age all men and all women prize copulation above all other
pleasures combined, yet it is actually as I have said: it is not in
their heaven; prayer takes its place."
-- Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth
" Most men do not sing, most men cannot sing, most men will not stay
when others are singing if it be continued more than two hours... In
man's heaven, everybody sings!
The man who did not sing on earth sings there; the man who could not
sing on earth is able to do it there.
The universal singing is not casual, not occasional, not relieved by
intervals of quiet; it goes on, all day long, and every day, during a
stretch of twelve hours.
And everybody stays; whereas in the earth the place would be empty
in two hours..."
-- Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth
"As a practical matter, we have chosen _as_a_people_ to make it harder
to conduct electronic searches for a law enforcement purpose than for
a foreign intelligence purpose. This is so because law enforcement
electronic searches implicate not only 4th Amendment privacy
interests, but also 5th Amendment liberty interests. After all, the
purpose of traditional law enforcement activity is to put criminals
behind bars"
-- "Statement for the record by Lt. Gen. M. V. Hayden. Director of the NSA"
17 Oct 2002
Interesting to note that they do consider themselves above the 4th and 5th
Amendments.
"This research was sparked by comments made by Microsoft VP Jim
Allchin who stated, under oath, that there were flaws in Windows so
great that they would threaten national security if the Windows source
code were to be disclosed."
"You only think this is a free country. Like the US the UK spends a lot of
time explaining its a free country because its a police state."
-- Alan Cox
"> Jokes are powerful and destructive things.
I don't think anyone can summarize the fanaticism of your
position any better than you just did."
-- Branden Robinson tells off Evan Prodromou in the
"Oh, oh, BitchX is racist"-thread on the debian-development list.
"Since SOAP relies on HTTP as the transport mechanism, and most
firewalls allow HTTP to pass through, you'll have no problem
invoking SOAP endpoints from either side of a firewall."
-- Microsofts view of security == work around the firewall
"Download a gzip of release source files"
-- This is the last thing I expected to see on research.microsoft.com
"What is the difference between Mechanical Engineers and Civil Engineers?
Mechanical Engineers build weapons. Civil Engineers build targets."
"Everything you've learned in school as 'obvious' becomes
less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe.
For example, there are no solids in the universe.
There's not even a suggestion of a solid.
There are no absolute continuums.
There are no surfaces.
There are no straight lines."
-- R. Buckminster Fuller
"Sometimes it is entirely appropriate to kill a fly with a sledge hammer."
-- Major Holdridge, 1994.
"``If the target didn't think he or she was communicating privately, they
wouldn't communicate,'' Hayden said. ``The key to this business is actually
doing what your adversary believed to be impossible.''"
-- Michael Hayden, director of the NSA
"Where the first primal cell was, there was I also. Where man is, there am I.
When the last life crawls under freezing stars, there will I be"
-- Death, in Terry Pratchetts "Mort"
"I am regularly asked what the average Internet user can do to ensure his
security. My first answer is usually "Nothing; you're screwed.""
-- Bruce Schneier
"Nihil tam munitum quod non expugnari pecuna possit"
"No place is so strongly fortified that money could not capture it"
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero, a Roman poet, statesman, philosopher and writer who
is supposed to have lived 106-43 B.C.
"It cannot be seen, common be felt,
cannot be heard, cannot be smelt.
It lies behind the stars and under hills,
and empty holes it fills"
(Answer: Dark)
-- J.R.R. Tolkien - The Hobbit
"``There are worse things than death''. Even with harddisks."
-- Linus Torvalds
"I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she's too
young to have logged on yet. Here's what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15
years from now, she will come to me and say 'Daddy, where were you when they
took freedom of the press away from the Internet?'"
-- Mike Godwin
"Many companies seem to believe that they have a natural right to profit,
and that anything that might prevent them from making a profit must be
against the law"
-- The Free Network Project
"Pay attention to your thoughts, because they become words. Pay attention to
your words, because they become actions. Pay attention to your actions,
because they become habits. Pay attention to your habits, because they
become your character. Pay attention to your character, because it becomes
your fate."
"When i think of "politics," i think of Jordan Hubbard, flat out lying
about what's in, or going to be in, FreeBSD, or what the system can
do, or what's wrong with the system."
-- Chris G Demetriou, NetBSD core member
"The nature of consciousness is such that evolution itself is
a doomsday machine."
-- Carl Sagan
"If you can't explain it to your grandmother, you don't really understand it
yourself."
-- Albert Einstein
"The web sucks. It is a mighty dismal kludge built out of a thousand
tiny dismal kludges all band-aided together, and now these bottom-line
clueless pinheads who never heard of "TCP handshake" want to run
*commerce* over the damn thing. Ye godz. Welcome to TV of the next
century -- six million channels of worthless shit to choose from, and
about as much security as today's cable industry!"
-- Mudge, netcat example comment
"They have computers, and they may have other weapons of mass destruction."
-- Janet Reno, US Attorney General, 27-02-1998
"If privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy."
-- PGP manual
"A firewall can only add another layer of security to your systems, but they
will not be able to stop a really determined cracker from penetrating your
internal network."
-- FreeBSD manual
"It's ironic, really. One of the claimed features of C++ is that it has
ways of enforcing abstractions by not allowing programmers to access
private class variables. The basic concept is that you don't trust
programmers enough to honor abstraction boundaries, so you have to
forcibly restrict them from touching them. (As opposed to simply
putting a comment in the header file saying, "keep your ugly paws off")."
-- Theodore Y. Ts'o, on the linux-kernel mailling list.
"If users are made to understand that the system administrator's job is to
make computers run, and not to make them happy, they can, in fact, be made
happy most of the time. If users are allowed to believe that the system
administrator's job is to make them happy, they can, in fact, never be made
happy."
-- Paul Evans (as quoted by Barb Dijker in "Managing Support Staff", LISA '97)
"When I shop for hardware I always look for the "Designed for Windows 95" logo.
I really thank Microsoft(TM) for encouraging manufacturers to label their
products this way, so I know what to AVOID.
I stick to quality software"
"We are dreamers, shapers, singers, and makers. We study the mysteries
of laser and circuit, crystal and scanner, holographic demons and
invocations of equations. These are the tools we employ, and we know
many things. Fourteen words to make someone fall in love with you
forever, seven words to make them go without pain, how to say goodbye
to a friend who is dying, how to be poor, how to be rich, how to
rediscover dreams when the world has stolen them from you."
- Elric the Technomage
Babylon 5: "A Geometry of Shadows"
"The war won't be over until the last spammer's
head is stuck onto a spear at the city limits."
-- Paul Vixie, NANOG mailing list, Sept.1997
"If all the personal computers in the world-260 million-were put to work
on a single PGP-encrypted message, it would still take an estimated 12
million times the age of the universe, on average, to break a single
message."
-- William Crowell, Deputy Director, National Security Agency, March 20, 1997.
(Then again, he *is* (was?) with the NSA)
"Being lucky consists of nothing more than stacking the odds in your favor
or, looking at it from another way, expending so much effort that opportunity
HAS to come visit you at some point."
-- Brian Hook, .plan file
"Deserve's got nothing to do with it."
"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not;
nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not;
unrewarded it's almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is filled
with educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent."
-- Calvin Coolidge
"I should point out that id Software is taking this
very seriously. Even if you're a hobbyist coder, if
you have a copy of Quake on your hard drive, you really,
really want to delete it. It's not like a $40 game
that got pirated. It's more like a product that
licenses for heaps o' cash, and nobody needs the kind
of legal trouble you can get in screwing around with
stuff like that."
-- Dave Taylor, crack.com
"[Note: I recieved an email from Tim Willits pointing out this
section. He corrected, saying that both John Romero and Tom Hall
were fired - they didn't want to leave. John Romero asked the
owners to make it sound amicable, and they complied, till Romero
fired off some remarks at id. Then the gloves were off.]"
-- Some interview
"Don't discount flying pigs before
you have good air defense."
-- jvh@clinet.fi
"... When a fly lands on the ceiling, does it do a half roll or a half loop?"
[ Answer: Sebag srrg nggnpu svefg, gura gur syl syvcf nebhaq. Fb, unys ybbc ]
"You cannot understand someone who is driven by the thirst for knowledge, not
for money and power. You cannot understand someone who wants to learn, and to
teach, instead of putting away more and more money into a bank account."
"When they took the fourth amendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs.
When they took the sixth amendment, I was quiet because I was innocent.
When they took the second amendment, I was quiet because I didn't own a gun.
Now they've taken the first amendment, and I can say nothing about it."